The Complete Guide to Personalized Emails
Merve Geneş
Publishedat
Email marketing is one of the most popular ways to reach out to customers and grow your business. With personalized email campaigns, you can personalize your messages for each individual customer, increasing the likelihood that they will open and respond to your emails. Personalization is an effective way to build relationships with your customers and increase brand awareness.
Additionally, email personalization can help you to target your marketing efforts more effectively. By personalizing your messages, you can ensure that you are reaching the right people with the right message. The easiest way to ensure it to use email personalizatio and talor your emails to your customers.
According to Harvard Business Review, an average person receives around 100 to 120 emails a day. Whereas the open rates are as low as 5%. The rest of them simply go to the trash or spam boxes, most probably because the senders don't practice email personalization to a sufficient degree. There might be many reasons as to why, but we will be focusing on how email personalization plays a part in it.
Before we explain how to avoid getting your email thrown into trash or spam, and make sure that they are opened through the power of email personalization, let's talk about what email personalization is and how it can help you generate sales and increase conversion and response rates.
What is a personalized email?
Email personalization is an email marketing tactic to tailor every email to the potential customers at hand to increase the chances of your emails getting opened in order to increase the sales rates, conversion rates, retention rates etc.
Personalized emails
A personalized email is an email that is tailored to the individual recipient by considering the customer data. This type of email is often used to provide a more personal touch, or to communicate specific information that is relevant to the recipient.
By practicing personalization in your cold email, you can ensure that it reaches your potential customers in a powerful way. Personalized emails give marketers the ability to target specific customers with special offers, relevant content, and important information about their service or product.
Targeted emails and segmentation
Emails can be used to reach to a group of target audience. With segmentation, you can send emails with dynamic content to satisfy users of different age, gender, location, etc. However, creating templates, even if they are for a big number of customers, usually limits email personalization and creates a generic idea about a group of people with the same interest you have in them. Later in this article, we will be talking about the limitations of templates.
Most marketers use segmentation and targeted emails for personalization, however, dividing your customers into groups and segmentation in general falls short when compared to focusing on one customer at a time to give your full attention to them. Since personalized emails should be specializing on a person at a time, we believe it is not enough to use these types of emails.
Moving with a more dynamic content to be created is more useful and will ensure your emails to get read.
Why You Should Use Cold Email Personalization?
For now, let’s just say that email personalization is all about providing your email recipients with individual treatment, showing them that you cared enough to customize some bits of your content, and it’s not just your email outreach tool blindly sending out generic emails.
A strong email personalization strategy will have people anticipating your emails, and it can certainly make emails more relevant. However, keep in mind that using personalization doesn’t necessarily make emails feel personal – especially in a world full of savvy consumers.
The goal of email personalization is to create a more personal email experience. The inbox is a private, personal place. When your brand’s emails arrive, you want people to feel like they’re hearing from a trusted friend. Because the last thing anyone needs is another advertisement.
A More Personal Experience
Personalized emails talk directly to the prospect as a real person and not just one in many others. It makes the reader feel special, which makes them open the email. To increase the engagement in your cold emails, try to send personalized emails and reach your customers in a more welcoming way.
Creating dynamic content that shapes with the customer data is very helpful for the email campaigns to achieve success.
How to Use Personalized Cold Emails in 5 Amazing Cases
Email is one of the most popular and powerful marketing tools. It is also one of the cheapest. With personalized emails, marketers can reduce the number of emails sent to non-interested recipients.
There are five amazing use cases where personalized emails are used:
Lead Generation: Personalized emails increase conversion rate.
Email Marketing Automation: Personalized emails improve engagement rates.
Customer Retention: Personalized emails increase customer retention rates.
Sales Process Optimization: Personalization increases sales conversion rates.
Content Marketing Optimization: Personalizing your email according to your customer can help you get a better open rate.
As you can see, email personalization is like a magic trick that helps you get amazing results and maximum productivity from you.
How to write personalized cold emails?
Email personalization is a data-driven digital marketing strategy aiming to deliver personalized email campaigns to the right customers at the right send time. The information needed to create personalized messages varies based on the goal of your campaign.
The following tips will help you create successful email campaigns.
1. Know your aim for writing your personalized email
Why do you want to send this email? What do you want to get in return? How do you want your customer to reach you once you've sent it? Having a plan beforehand will make you achieve great results when it comes to personalied emails because then you can write that email fully in accordince with your customer.
2. Research the customers and their interests to personalize for them
Before you create your email campaign, it is important to research the audience and their interests. Gathering a bit of data is amazing for personalization. Knowing what they do what projects they work on will be of great help when you are writing your personalized email. You can ask a few questions to yourself to gather this data. For example, what are they interested in? What are they reading? What topics do they talk about?
You need to know your customers in order to send personalized emails at scale. Getting to know them for a bit will show your interest in them and can increase their chances of replying. They will know that you personalized the email for them and will feel closer to you.
3. Use emotional triggers
Emotional triggers are a great way to get customers engaged with your emails because they make them feel something, which is what you want your customers to feel when interacting with your brand. Triggered emails are here to show every customer that they are special to you and that you care for them. Campaigns that focus on emotional engagement gathers more interest than those that do not so simply personalize emails by adding a little emotion into them.
7 personalization strategies for email marketing
Using email personalization strategies are crucial when it comes to increasing open rates in cold emailing. Personalizing your emails is easier than you think. Let's take a look at the best practices for writing personalized emails.
1. Email templates might not always fit
If the shoe doesn’t fit, don’t wear it. Using email templates are usually useful if you would like to send one or two emails. However, what will be the solution if you are in need of a marketer who needs to send way more emails than a few a day?
While sending personalized emails in masses, it is important to make sure that they do not become generic because people can easily delete them or worse, mark them as spam.
2. A person rather than a company name
To create a more trustworthy environment for your customers, show that you are a real person at the other side of the email that has reached your customer's inbox. Even though you might be working for a company or brand, at most times, seeing a real person's name rather than a company name can feel more trusting.
Another way to write your first name and your company name together. For example "Onur from Nureply" would also be okay.
3. Name in subject line
The easiest way to personalize mass emails is to add a customer’s name to your subject line. It is proven that putting the customer's name in the subject line increases the chances of getting that email opened by 18%.
There is nothing more personal than a person's own name. Everyone likes to hear it, so putting the name in the subject line will fell like your customer has received a little message from a friend. It will boost your email personalization to some good levels.
Unfortunately, it isn't enough on its own, which brings us to our next point about email personalization.
4. Getting more personal than only a name
Contrary to popular belief, email personalization does not end at addressing your customer or subscriber by their first name. It involves sending out relevant and timely content that your customer or subscriber can’t resist but to consume. The data you can use can be anything from a name to the company they work in to projects they work on.
Gathering enough data to create your personalized emails based on that is one of the main strategies for email personalization, and it is needed in every single word of your email.
5. Less formal language
Email marketing almost always advices people to use less of a formal language. It will create an unvisible bond between your and your customers and will make them feel more close to you - definitely not like the next advertiser in their inbox.
So personalize your email by using more "I" sentences, to give an example, or basically setting a more relaxed tone overall.
This should go for all of your email from top to bottom. So it is important to know how to end your your cold email.
6. Keep it short
Send your emails without writing a whole text block in them. Not only will it better your campaigns for email marketing but it will also be polite in a way, since you do not want to take the recipient's time.
Especially in a personalized cold email, you want to get to the point as soon as possible and explain it in a polite, non pushin manner. Unfortunately many marketers sound a bit pushy about getting sales or promoting their products when they want to keep the email short. To find that sweet spot between keeping it short enough and being as polite and intruging as possible could be great.
7. Consider follow ups
To show that you really care for your potential customers and want them to reach better products or services, it is completely okay to send follow up emails. A sequence of personalized emails will be more effective than only one, considering your potential customer might have missed the previous one(s).
How to write personalized cold emails?
Simply adding a personalized email subject line, the person’s name in the opening line, or a personalized email signature are simple personalization methods that can help you hit the mark in the email outreach game and generally elevate your marketing campaigns.
Let’s break down what to write in your personalized email one by one and how to make each segment specialized and personalized.
1. Subject line
Start personalizing your emails from the very beginning: the subject lines.
The subject line is the first thing people see when they open an email, so make sure it's catchy enough to catch their attention. You can use AI technology to generate different ideas for personalized subject lines that will get people interested in opening your emails. Nowadays it it used a lot in email marketing and helps email personalization a lot.
As we have talked before in this article, adding the name in subject line will be really useful for personalization. Many marketers use this tactic for their emails.
To get an idea about what other Use these examples for subject lines to personalize emails easily.
2. Greeting
Greet your customer using a not-so-formal tone. In a cold email, it is your first time reaching out to someone but shıwing sincerity through the way you greet them is always a good start in the email content. Basically a "hi [first name]" feels closer than a "dear [full name]".
Of course, it depends on the person you are writing your personalized email to, however, only highly formal spaces are in need of writing in a more formal tone. A government institution, for example.
3. First line
First line will be shown in the inbox page, right after the first name and the subject line. It must be good eneough to make the customer click. It is the perfect opportunity for personalization because they won't read it if they sense that the same email has been sent to many other people and it is some advertisement like the most of their inobx.
In the first line you can use a personalization technique that might take their attention - that is to talk about them to them.
For example, "I saw your last project and I must say I'm really interested." It will make your email highly personalized and will increase the chances of getting it read. Feels more natural, more human-like.
Remember that at this point you must have gathred enough data to be able write the email in a personalized way. If you do not have enough data about your customer then you will fall into the trap of becoming too generic and won't be able to practice personalization in your email anymore.
An easy way to make sure that you are creating personalized emails in masses (especially useful for marketeres or email marketing side of your business), you can bulk first lines with only adding your email list to Nureply. It will save you tons of time! You can take a look at the bulking first line solution here.
4. Adding value
All of the email campaigns you create should add value to your message. In personalized emails every word choice, every sentence you use should be of value because we do not want to take the customers' time and get to the point.
To make sure that you can personalize your email, you must gather enough data. Why should your customer care about what you're telling them? What does it do for them? Knowing these will up your personalization game.
Another point when adding value is to keep it relevant. If what you're telling them is not relevant to them and has no chance of sparking an interest in them, they will not engage with that email. You want to keep things as personalized as possible and to do that add value to your message, make their time that they'r reading the email worth it.
5. Call to action
Once you have added the value to your personalized emails, next is to calling them to some type of act. For example, you could give a link to your website, urge them to not miss this deal about the product, or simply letting them know that you are waiting for a reply. It should be all personalized and in accordance with your aim of writing the email at the first place.
6. Closing
A personalized email signature shows that from top to bottom you really put your heart into this small email and that you hope that it really reaches your customer. A nice ending to this personalized content you've created is the last perfect touch to it.
Conclusion:
One of the most well-liked strategies for connecting with customers and expanding your business is email marketing. You can make each customer's experience more unique through email personalization, which increases the likelihood that they will read and respond to your emails. This is a powerful strategy for strengthening consumer ties and raising market presence.
Start personalizing emails with our AI tool to send personalized emails and include the best practices in them.
How to a Create Successful Email Marketing Strategy Using AI Technology
By having your email list ready, you can use AI technology for creating a successful email marketing campaign. Personalize your emails by having them go through the filter of our AI that gives you a new line for each new customer data it gets. To use a more advanced personalization, you can sign up here.